N.Y. Times public editor praises NSA story

9/6/13 2:05 PM EDT

New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan is praising the paper for bucking government requests not to publish sensitive information on the National Security Agency for a story published Thursday in conjunction with ProPublica, she writes in a post on Friday.

"Jill Abramson, told me that while she and the managing editor Dean Baquet went to Washington to meet with officials and gave them 'a respectful hearing,' the decision to publish was 'not a particularly anguished one,'" Sullivan writes.

The article says that the NSA uses its ability to break the encryption, used to guard global commerce and banking systems, sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and securing e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls.

Sullivan praises the editors at the Times for ultimately deciding that public interest trumped the government's concern.

"The encryption article — an important story, published courageously — is a very welcome development. The American public has the right to know, and debate, what its government is doing. Times editors and reporters, as well as those at The Guardian and ProPublica, deserve plenty of credit for how they have handled this."

The Times did withhold some information, Abramson tells Sullivan, but that readers have not seen the end of NSA stories in the Times.

Yesterday ProPublica editor-in-chief Stephen Engelberg and president Richard Tofel posted a letter explaining that their decision to publish the story was based on the desire to increase "public knowledge of the power the government possesses."